Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul…
Irenaeus interpreted Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Matthew 20:1-16). The first-hour men are Jews, and the eleventh-hour men, who slip into the vineyard at the last minute, are Gentiles converted by the apostles. Over the surly objections of the Jews,…
Luke 3-4 follows, like Matthew 3-4, the history of Israel. Jesus is the true Israel, recapitulating Israel’s failed story. But the sequence is somewhat different in the two passages. In Matthew, Jesus receives baptism from John, enters the wilderness to be tempted, begins His ministry in Galilee, before ascending to…
INTRODUCTION Jesus continues on the way toward Jerusalem , predicting His own future and teaching the Twelve about discipleship. They don’t understand, but fortunately Jesus is the compassionate Son of David, who opens blind eyes ( 20:29 -34). THE TEXT “Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples…
Psalm 89 explicitly tells us that Yahweh entered into a covenant with David (v. 28), which makes David the firstborn over the kings of the earth (v. 27) and promises a perpetual seed and sonship (vv. 26, 29). The Psalm as a whole, however, is about an apparently broken covenant.…
In the first volume of his history of ethics, Terence Irwin gievs a chapter to Plato, four to Aristotle, but nine to Aquinas. Reviewing the book in the TLS , Anthony Kenny says that Aquinas “emerges as the hero of the entire volume,” and, after noting that Irwin holds a…
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